13 Useful JavaScript Solutions for Charts and Graphs

Graphs and charts are used to simplify complex data and make it easy to read and understand. So it really wouldn’t make sense if it was difficult to integrate a graph into a website. Thanks to Javascript and a bunch of talented developers, we have at our disposal solutions for easily adding graphs and charts to our web projects. Here are 13 of these, including some written for jQuery and MooTools, that you will find very useful.

JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs. Moreover, JS Charts is free for non-commercial use.

PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support. PlotKit is fully documented and there is a quick tutorial to get you started.

This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript. The plugin is compatible with most modern browsers and has been tested with Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8.

Milkchart is a simple to use, yet robust library for transforming table data into a chart. This library uses the HTML5 canvas tag and is only supported on browsers other than IE until ExCanvas gets proper text support.